Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

Kate pulled the car over next to Daley Plaza. Parking wasn’t ordinarily allowed there, but the cops looked the other way for one another. That was one of the perks of the job. The pay sucks, the pension is shaky, people curse at you and try to goad you into anger while recording you on their smartphones, and you never know when someone might stick a gun in your face—but hey, the parking is great.

“Watch yourself around her is all I’m saying,” Kate warned me as she threw the car into park. “You could get us both in trouble.”

Twenty-Eight

“DETECTIVE HARNEY, Detective Fenton, good morning.” Assistant state’s attorney Amy Lentini was all business when we walked into her office. She was decked out in a crisp blue suit that hugged her nicely, a perfect blend of professionalism and flattery. She cleaned up good, I had to admit.

She showed us to seats and stood by the window, overlooking Daley Plaza. The fact that she had an office with a window said something about her status here. I still didn’t know her story, how she moved up the chain, whom she knew. Hell, for all I knew, she got where she was on her merits. There was a first time for everything.

“Congratulations on your reinstatement,” she said with no trace of irony.

“It’s only temporary, until the board rules on the merits of our case,” I said. “Something about the presumption of innocence. I think we have that in this country.”

“That sounds familiar,” she replied, deadpan.

“Some people still want us kicked off the force. Oh, wait.” I snapped my fingers. “That someone is you.”

Her head inclined to the right, the beginning of a smirk on her face. “It’s a delicate situation.”

“A delicate situation,” Kate said, mimicking her. “You really are a lawyer.”

“I’m a lawyer who’s not going to lose this case,” said Amy. “And you, Detectives, are my case, whether I like it or not. So putting this business about the little black book aside, we need to be ready for the attack.” She opened her hands. “Although believe me—any time you want to tell me what happened to that black book, I’m all ears.”

Sure she was. She must have assumed that other celebrities and politicians and power brokers were featured in that tell-all book. She was an ambitious prosecutor who had stumbled on a career-maker of a case. The bigger the fish, the bigger the boost to her career.

“We don’t know what happened to that book,” said Kate.

Amy narrowed her eyes at Kate but didn’t answer. Nothing was going to be resolved between her and us, probably ever, on that score. “You’re going to be attacked,” she said. “The defense doesn’t have much else to say. The mayor, the archbishop, all the men you caught—they have no defense to this crime. You caught them, in some cases literally, with their pants down.”

Yeah, it wasn’t the archbishop’s finest moment. I didn’t remember the mayor coming off so well, either.

“So their only avenue is to attack the police,” Amy went on, pacing by the window. “They will challenge the constitutionality of your entry into the brownstone. They’ll say you lacked probable cause.”

“Piece of cake,” I said. “I had information that that brownstone was a brothel. They weren’t going in there to play bingo.”

“Oh, okay, so this case will be easy,” Amy said, dripping with sarcasm.

I sat back in my chair. “Easy as Sunday morning.”

“So you won’t mind if I ask you a few questions about it?”

“Shoot.”

“Okay.” Amy looked up at the ceiling, as though she were recalling events. “So you went to that brownstone to confront a man whom you suspected of murdering that student at the University of Chicago.”

“That’s how it started. That’s why we were there in the first place. But then it all changed.”

“Suddenly you were a Vice cop. Suddenly you didn’t care one iota about that suspect. Suddenly you wanted to bust up a prostitution ring.”

“Yeah, the focus changed. I was witnessing a crime in progress—”

“What crime did you witness in progress? Did you see some prostitute screwing some guy? Did you see money changing hands?”

“Obviously not,” I said.

“Obviously not . You were outside in your car. So you saw a bunch of individual men walking into a brownstone.”

“A brownstone I knew to be a brothel.”

“Run that by me again—how’d you know it was a brothel?” She scratched her cheek in mock curiosity.

“I had been following my suspect. I saw him going in there the week before. I had a suspicion about what he was doing, but I wasn’t sure.”

“You weren’t sure because all you saw the week before, when you were trailing the suspect, was a man walking into the brownstone and then coming back out later.”

“Right.”

“It’s not a crime to walk in and out of a brownstone, is it?”

“Obviously not.”

“You didn’t hear him say, ‘Gee, I just had sex with a prostitute.’”

I gave her a cold smile.

“He wasn’t wearing a sign around his neck that said ‘Just got a blow job,’ was he?” she asked.

“It was more like one of those sandwich boards,” I said. “One side said ‘I just paid someone for sex.’ The other side said ‘I also killed a U of C undergrad. Arrest me!’”

She stared at me.

“You’re correct, Counselor,” I said. “When I was following the suspect, all I saw was him going in and coming out.”

“So you had no idea what was going on inside that brownstone.”

“But then I sat on the place,” I said.

“You did recon.”

“Sure, recon. I sat on the place. I saw young beautiful women going into the place and older men going in, too.”

“Did you know for a fact that any of those young women were prostitutes?”

“For a fact? No. But the way they were dressed made me think so.”

“Well,” Amy said, opening her hands. “How were they dressed?”

“Like hookers,” I said. “Showing a lot of leg. Hair teased up. Lots of makeup.”

“So all women who dress provocatively are hookers?”

“Of course not.”

“ Most of them are?”

“No,” I said, leaning forward. “But I watched maybe a dozen young women walk into that place and then a bunch of much older men.”

“How do you know they didn’t go to separate floors of that brownstone?” Amy asked. “How do you know that the women weren’t having a party in the garden apartment and the men weren’t a bunch of old college buddies watching the Bulls game together in a different apartment?”

I shook my head. I was playing a hunch that night, the law of probabilities, going with instinct. That’s what cops do. No, I wasn’t positive that brownstone was a brothel, but it sure as hell looked like it.

Still, I had to admit she had just tied me in knots. I was beginning to think I’d underestimated Amy Lentini.

Amy moved away from the window, came around the desk, and stood against it, facing me head-on. “And I was being gentle,” she said. “The mayor and the archbishop have hired two of the best defense lawyers in the country. If you didn’t have probable cause to enter that brownstone, our whole case is gone. And they won’t blame me for that.”

No. Everyone would blame me, the cop who muffed the search.

“So believe it or not,” she said, “ like it or not, I’m on your side.”

Twenty-Nine

TWO HOURS later, Kate and I were in the elevator, heading out of Daley Center. Another person got in with us but checked out two floors below, leaving us alone.

The moment the doors closed and it was just us, Kate punched me in the arm.

“Ow. What’s your problem?”